the stigma of meter 63
Nor first from heaven (and few know this)
Swings the stroke dealt —
Stroke and a stress that stars and storms deliver, 45
That guilt is hushed by, hearts are flushed by and melt —
But it rídes tíme like ríding a river
(And here the faithful waver, the faithless fable and miss)Even Christ’s anger, his stress and strokes, are cyclical, metrical: his anger rides
time like riding a river. The second to last line of the stanza carries the only
indicated stresses, as if to emphasize the marked regularity of Christ’s eventual
rage. “The stroke dealt” is not only a blow from the Lord but also the “strike”
of stress above the line, particularly noticeable in this primarily monosyllabic
stanza. The parenthetical final line of the stanza: “and here the faithful waver:
the faithless fable and miss” might indicate the true and false readers of Hop-
kins’s meter—the faithless might miss the beats he intends, whereas the faith-
ful will catch them, though they will be forced to “waver.” The line also refers
to the process of marking the “strokes of stress” on a poem about divine trans-
formation, itself a process in which the poet wavers.
Uncertainty (wavering ) over whether or not to mark, indeed, how to mark
the “divine” word is writ large in the example of the nun’s death. In stanza 17,
“the women” are “wailing” (l. 134). The dissolution of spoken words becomes
evident in the accusation of stanza 18: “make words break from me here all
alone, / Do you!” (l. 139), and in the desperation of stanza 19: “Sister, a sister
calling / A master, her master and mine!” (l. 145). Hopkins likens himself to
the nun, here, serving the same master. Nature blinds her, but she “sees” figura-
tively how its “smart” blows will transform her and how, despite the “brawl-
ing” of the storm, her call will be heard:
The rash smart sloggering brine
Blínds her; but shé that wéather sees óne thing, óne:
Has óne fetch ín her: she réars hersélf to divíne 150
E’ars, and the cáll of the táll nún
To the mén in the tóps and the táckle rode óver the stórms brawling.Though she wants her voice to be heard by divine “E’ars,” it is the men “in the
tops of the tackle” who hear her. Hopkins plays on the repetition of “ear” in
“rears” and marks that her “self ” is what she is sending up with her voice. But
the word “Ear” is broken—the metrical mark to the side again. By isolating the
“E” of “Ears,” Hopkins introduces a pun on “ars,” on arsis, the Greek name for
the metrical mark on a stressed syllable.^43 By emphasizing the marked, stressed
syllables in the stanza, we see through Hopkins’s marked words “one,” “one,”
“one” that the nun’s self knows precisely what she is about to become (one
with God). She is both “nun” and “none,” one part of a larger pattern of in-
scape that marks her for transformation into the divine. Julia Saville calls this